thanks for the help. this forum rules the world. i thought i had added 'chinook' to the distribution under maemo extras, but it had somehow switched back to nothing again...probably when the rtcom installer insisted on re-installing the extras repo. i also added the 'maemo chinook' repo, which i was missing. one or both of these things fixed the problem.
out of the box, this tablet is great, and with a little tinkering it can do so much that a regular computer does.